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Coffee at Home and at Restaurant

by Hugh Acheson

on 06/07/12 at 11:00 AM

I drink a lot of coffee. I always have since my fateful first cup at 12 years old. My day starts with a simple pot of the brown elixir brewed on a Technivorm Moccamaster, the only drip coffee maker worth its salt, and then continues with a later espresso at a shop, and then my last drop comes sometime around 4 p.m., brewed in the phenomenally inexpensive AeroPress.

I am not overly fancy about the production. I have a simple whirly blade grinder, kryptonite to most coffee nerds. I am in the process of shopping out home burr grinders but they are expensive and frankly, the coffee I make at home is pretty good so I have been comfortable with my caffeinated status quo. But that's at home.

At the restaurants you see the evolution of my interest in coffee. The first restaurant, 5&10, has a very basic coffee setup with a focus on simple drip and basic espresso. Not great at all but the regular coffee is quite tasty and they recently installed a really good drip system that rocks.

Our second restaurant, the National, began to take coffee much more seriously and has a manual-pull two-head espresso machine with a really great burr grinder, and a focused purveyor of fine coffee for the roasted beans. Counter Culture in Durham, North Carolina, has always been a treat to work with and they made the program even better with proper training and maintenance, two elements missed in most restaurants that have good coffee programs. The National has always made a great Cortado, an espresso with a smidgen of steamed milk, similar to a macchiato.

When I opened the third restaurant, Empire State South, I had matured in into my late 30s, coffee was still a constant in my life and I felt that there was an interesting anomaly out there in the restaurant world: There were about very few restaurants in the country that had coffee programs that really tried to be phenomenal. It was also very selfish in that I wanted to have great coffee to drink as we worked. We set up a fun program and I was jittery for the first six months after opening, enjoying the results to a point of excess.

The program at Empire State South centers around Counter Culture once again, a great pour-over system, a beautiful La Marzocco, Mazzer grinders, Fetco drippers, the whole kit of a pro shop. The key though is dedicated practitioners: true baristas. Bartenders know cocktails, chefs know food, shouldn't we have professionals making your coffee?

That said, it probably hasn't been the best business decision of all time. It's expensive to provide the labor for a dedicated coffee program. Usually you have a frantic waiter making your espresso and that's a pretty easy expense to justify. Harder is having a person stand and make four, maybe 10, beautiful coffee drinks per hour...but do the math and rarely are you going to hit that magic 25 percent labor cost on those numbers. But stubbornness and a want for great quality have always been with us and we're willing to take the hit. And, as I have told you already, I love a great coffee.

Back to home and making coffee on the inexpensive wonder that is the AeroPress. I get coffee delivered through a fun little outfit called TONX for home consumption. Every two weeks I get a 12-ounce bag of meticulously sourced and roasted beans shipped to me, literally packed and shipped within 24 hours of roasting. It's a subscription-based service and I have been a loyal buyer since day one. The coffee from TONX this week is an El Salvadoran Finca Monterey/Bambu, an estate owned and run by Nancy Majano. There is something so direct about knowing the name of the person responsible for anything you put in your body, but more on that in a future post.

This coffee loves the AeroPress, a simple paper filter plunger contraption that takes 10 seconds to make coffee that shows the beautiful nuances, the hard work, the terroir, and the reality of a regional bean.

The best benefit is me getting to get Cortados all day long... we truly adore the program and will never get rid of it. Call it the loss leader.

jordanomcdonald 09:24:36 AM on 06/08/12

Chef A., there are perhaps unrealized benefits of your superior coffee bar at ESS. My wife and I have a weekly Friday lunch date. ESS often gets the nod because I know I can wash down my Super Food plate with a tasty espresso. Keep up the great work!

crpaulk 11:14:22 AM on 06/07/12

Your little Aeopress is very retro cool. We go through about 8-10 lbs of espresso a month. I can't imagine having to squeeze out that much by hand!